Seventh Retribution
Page 13
‘Tell me everything.’
And they did.
One of the greatest challenges facing the interrogator was that once a subject gave up the defence of his mind, the information then had to be sorted. The great majority of it was useless. He glimpsed snatches of childhoods on Opis, and from this it was enough to confirm that the peasants and the Aristeia had such markedly different experiences it was like reading the minds of two different species. The peasants were steeped in the idea of inferiority, that there was something wrong with them from the moment they were born and that the Aristeia were their betters in every possible way. The Aristeia, meanwhile, were harried by a desperate corruption, a sort of social panic in which they maintained their status by ever more wanton expenditure and acts of oppression. They turned themselves into miserable, obsessed people, islands eternally disconnected, ripe for turning to a dark cause. Perfect chattels for those who could control them.
It was remarkable that Opis had taken so long to become prey to the Dark Gods’ champions. Deiphobus wondered if moral threats had always held Opis in their grip, and that Kekrops had simply been the first to notice.
But no. The moral threats were new. He could taste that in their minds. He had a feeling of a previous age, not so long ago, still grim and devoid of happiness, but one now fondly remembered like a golden-hued youth. Darkness had come to Opis. Each captive had the same concept of time.
Five years. He could be no more accurate than that, given the ragged state of the prisoners’ minds. Five years ago, something had come to Opis and in its wake followed moral threats from off-world. There had been dark things on Opis before, pleasure-cults and rebels who sought supernatural aid, but nothing like this. Opis was invaded and silently, without mercy or pause, a power structure had embedded itself in Opis’s society above the level of the Aristeia. The Aristeia still ruled, but the planet’s new lords permitted the Aristeia to exist.
Then the Imperium had arrived. The mutations began. The new lords were seen in the open. Deiphobus recognised in the prisoners’ memories the moral threats Tchepikov’s staff had held briefings on. A glowing, winged woman, reported during the assault supported by the Sanctifier. A thing like an enormous spider with a human face, which was recalled holding thunderous, hypnotic sermons somewhere in Khezal. Even Filthammer, glimpsed holding a great sacrificial rite on the eve of the first Imperial assaults.
Deiphobus let his mind withdraw. The captives fell away, back into their own bodies. The brig corridor swam back into view.
Why were they here? What was on Opis that they wanted?
And who? Who had brought them?
Booted footsteps caught Deiphobus’s attention. He was on his feet as the brig’s heavy blast door slid open.
‘Librarian,’ said Commander Tchepikov, who walked in flanked by a pair of intelligence officers. He wore his full uniform, and Deiphobus wondered if he was ever out of it. ‘The battle in Rekaba continues.’
‘So I understand,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I have seen the dispatches for the day. The enemy will not relinquish, that much is proven.’
‘And the Imperial Fists have abandoned their post,’ said Tchepikov. It was stated as more of a fact than a rebuke.
Deiphobus folded his arms and looked down at the commander. At his full height he dwarfed Tchepikov. He was probably more massive than Tchepikov and the two officers put together. But Tchepikov did not back down. ‘The implications of your words,’ Deiphobus said, ‘are most grave.’
‘Facts, Librarian,’ continued Tchepikov. ‘Nothing more. The Temple of the Muses held during the night, and in the morning the Imperial Fists left. It is now defended only by the Imperial Guard.’
‘Who are being reinforced as we speak,’ replied Deiphobus.
‘That is not my point, Librarian, as you well know. The plan for the invasion of Rekaba was drawn up in the belief that the Imperial Fists would be a part of it. Now, they are not. When my best soldiers abandon me, they become worse than no soldiers at all.’
‘Your soldiers?’ Deiphobus took a step closer to Tchepikov. ‘We are not your soldiers. We belong to the Emperor, and to the legacy of Rogal Dorn. We hold our own counsel and then fight our own battles. Our commander is Captain Lysander, not Tchepikov. You knew when you requested our aid that the Imperial Fists are an independent force, a sovereign and autonomous Chapter who owe loyalty to the Imperium but obedience to no one.’
‘And where are your battle-brothers, Imperial Fist?’
‘We will hold our own counsel on that, too.’
Tchepikov had not risen to his rank by losing his composure when crossed. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Unless you have urgent business among these vermin.’
Deiphobus followed Tchepikov as the commander walked out of the brig. He was trusted by Lysander to act as a link between the Imperial Fists and the rest of the strike force, and the insult of being given such a blunt order by Tchepikov could be ignored for now. Tchepikov led him up to the command deck, where only a couple of officers now sat at the huge conference table poring over reports from the field.
‘Here,’ said Tchepikov. With a gesture he activated the holo-servitor which scrabbled along the ceiling. Its metallic torso split open and the lenses of the holo-projector lit up, casting a strategic map of Opis over the table.
‘The Khezal and Rekaba fronts,’ said Tchepikov. ‘Operations Requiem and Catullus. Already my reserves are committed maintaining the cordons and policing the refugee camps. And arriving in orbit within the next seventy-two hours, reinforcements to be deployed immediately.’ The map shifted, showing new lines of attack around the continent of plains and river deltas to the north of Khezal, leading up into tundras and then to icy wastes towards the pole.
‘The third front,’ said Tchepikov. ‘The population not contained in the cities is being bled out of their towns and villages, northwards. We don’t know where. The Aristeia are welding them into new armies. Millions of them, Librarian. It will take everything I have to pen them in and keep them from gathering into a force that could besiege Khezal and sweep us off this planet. And you, your Chapter, are off fighting your own war. Do you understand why I must have every soldier on this planet fighting as I deploy them? If any front collapses, we are lost. Any battle could turn the tide of the war, and the Imperial Fists can turn the tide of any battle.’
‘Do you think we are ignorant of this, commander?’ said Deiphobus. ‘We arrived here willing to follow your orders because the enemy was clear. The killers of Inquisitor Kekrops had to be rooted out and punished, and Opis’s government torn out and replaced. But this war is no longer so simple. We do not know who the enemy truly is. We do not know what he wants or who we can trust. Answering those questions will do as much for victory on Opis as a million Imperial Guardsmen.’
Tchepikov looked at the strategic map again. The deployment of well over half a million Imperial Guardsmen was allocated to the third front, with the same again in Khezal and Rekaba. Thousands of tanks and artillery pieces were scheduled to drop in from orbit in vast landings in the trackless terrain of the northern continent. ‘I know I cannot command you,’ said Tchepikov. ‘But I can appeal to your honour.’
‘Our honour is satisfied only in victory,’ said Deiphobus. ‘And we will pursue it in the way Captain Lysander sees fit. There is nothing further to discuss.’
‘Then leave my ship,’ said Tchepikov. ‘It will damage morale if it becomes known that the Space Marines and the Imperial commander are not of the same mind. I will not allow that rot to set in. Join your battle-brothers and report back to me when you are willing to fight my war.’
Deiphobus left Tchepikov in the gloom of the command deck, absorbed in the potential battles marked out on the holographic map, the nameless plains and gulleys which would soon be the graves of thousands of men.
K-Day +13 Days
Independent Adeptus Astartes operations
Scout-Sergeant Orfos’s arm had not been fully accepted by his body. Th
e muscles and bones of his upper arm had still to bond fully with the new bionic. His forearm and hand were now fashioned of dull metal, articulated with servos and cabling. The feedback was buzzing and metallic, an alien feeling that he wondered if he would ever get used to, and phantom pains flashed through nerves that were no longer there.
His arm hurt now, as he crept ahead of the main force, knife in his bionic hand as he scanned for booby traps. A Scout learned rapidly about trip-wires and pits, training his enhanced vision to pick out subtle anomalies that might indicate a grenade rigged in the undergrowth or a deadfall trap almost invisible through the foliage above.
The jungle was dark. Beams of sunlight reached through the many layers of the canopy, but they were few. Sound was everywhere, the endless chirping and humming of insects, the almost-human shrieks of hunting birds and the howls of predators. The wind picked up and the trees overhead sighed among each other with a sound like the ocean. Among the movement of the wind and of the creatures that flitted just out of sight, Orfos strained to pick out a threat.
Enriaan and Privar were spaced out, almost too far to see, advancing at the same pace. Vonretz was dead, buried up in the mountains, and Geryius was at Sigismund Point, missing a good chunk of his spine and several organs. He would probably live, but he might never fight.
A structure loomed from the trees up ahead. ‘Halt,’ voxed Orfos quietly. He could just see Enriaan through the trees, crouching to scan the terrain ahead through the scope of his sniper rifle.
The structure was a tower, rising almost as high as the canopy, and draped with hanging vines and moss. It was metallic, segmented like a column, with ribbed cabling running down one side. Cylindrical structures were half-buried in the ground around it.
‘There’s a structure up ahead,’ voxed Orfos. ‘I think we’re here.’
<
Orfos moved closer. Beside the tower was the charred wreck of a fighter craft – not the Sanctifier but one of the Aristeia’s own naval fliers. It had been sliced in two, and the two chunks had slammed into the jungle floor. A shaft of sunlight still fell through the hole in the canopy the fighter had torn as it crashed.
‘It’s an energy weapon,’ said Orfos. His eyes followed the power lines from the buried generators up the tower to the array of projector vanes at the top. ‘An air interdiction system. It’s a Standard Template Construct pattern. It’s advanced, but I still recognise it.’
<
‘Originally, maybe.’ Orfos stepped over the tangle of thick roots underfoot. The dirt gave way and he stopped before his foot sank into it.
He scuffed the surface away. A skull looked back at him, jumbled together with ribs and limb bones from many more bodies.
‘Got a mass grave here,’ said Orfos.
<
A creature with a feline shape and scaled hide slunk out from behind the tower. Its lean musculature undulated under its reptilian skin, and four amber eyes focused on Orfos. Its tail curled up over its back and it crouched down, shoulders meeting over its head, bunched up ready to strike.
Orfos didn’t move. Sleep-taught instincts weighed up the predator’s combat capabilities. It had six limbs, the back pair powerful for both leaping and raking prey on the ground. The teeth were long and slender, for latching onto an adversary’s neck and severing the spine. Its place at the top of the food chain had honed it into a sleek and effective killer.
The creature darted out of Orfos’s sight, gone with barely a rustle of the leaves.
Orfos hadn’t moved. Something else had spooked it.
Orfos whirled around. A section of the jungle floor powered up – it was the roof of a concealed bunker, forced up to the surface by hydraulics. Revealed was a compartment in which was crouched a mass of muscle and machinery. Orfos identified quad autoguns unfolding.
‘Servitors,’ voxed Orfos. He didn’t have time to elaborate before the servitor’s armoured cranium turned to him, lenses whirring.
Orfos vaulted a bank of entangled roots and dropped to the ground on the other side. Gunfire opened up and slammed into the roots. Splinters burst everywhere.
He glanced at the servitor through the roots. It was built for toughness and not mobility, with wide shoulders and short, heavy legs, the head unit set low in the chest. Orfos rolled out from behind cover and ran, head down, past the arc of fire as the autoguns hammered shots just past him.
Orfos grabbed the upper edge of the servitor’s shoulder guard, swinging himself up onto its back. He blasted into the thick spinal column with his bolt pistol, and black hydraulic fluid sprayed. The servitor bucked like an animal, Orfos losing his footing and barely hanging on. He rammed the tip of his knife blade between the ruptured plates of its back and twisted. Sparks fountained over him. The servitor threw its body forwards and Orfos was catapulted over its head, tearing off a handful of armour as he fell.
He rolled as he landed, up onto one knee. The four guns were trained on him. The servitor’s skull was exposed, red and raw, the armour-plating pulled away. Some echo of a face was there, the face of the condemned man or woman who had been converted into this machine, their brain programmed with its orders, their nervous system hooked up to its weapons.
The head snapped back, brains sprayed across the armoured shoulders. The servitor sank back onto its haunches, weapons drooping.
Behind Orfos was Enriaan, on his knees, focusing through the scope of his sniper rifle. The shot he had fired had blown the back of the servitor’s skull out, and he fired a second, shattering what remained. The remnants of the servitor’s head hung by a bundle of cables. A targeter lens fell out into the dirt.
‘Good kill,’ said Orfos.
<
‘Captain, we’re clear here,’ voxed Orfos. ‘Someone has gone to great pains to keep intruders out.’
<
A hundred metres ahead was another perimeter, this time of trip-wires and motion sensors. Orfos could see them from here, picked out by his training as if they had been lit up against the jungle gloom. Beyond them, arched over by trees so as to be invisible from above, was a rockcrete structure sealed with a heavy steel door.
‘Looks like a way in,’ voxed Orfos. ‘It’s underground.’
<
The air carried death on it.
Not just the smell of decay. That was there, too, and was as familiar to a Space Marine as sweat or the smoke from a bolter impact. It was the sterility of the heavily scrubbed air, the way footsteps on the floor grilles had no echo. Life had been torn away, and a stillness remained.
Lysander had led the way in. Once a path in was secured, the Scouts had done their job. A captain among the Space Marines had a clear duty to lead from the front.
He had torn the blast doors open with a swipe of the Fist of Dorn. He had kicked his way through the walls of the decontamination chamber he found beyond, and had been the first to walk into the immense chamber the Rekaban jungles had kept hidden until now.
An enormous shaft sank hundreds of metres straight down. A series of elevators, like suspended cages, gave access to the floors below leading off from the shaft. The darkness below did not quite conceal the grinders at the base of the shaft, units used to shred whatever was thrown down there. Whatever happened here, it sometimes produced results that had to be destroyed in a hurry.
Squad Ctesiphon and Assault Squad Septuron
spread out behind Lysander to secure the upper floors. Librarian Deiphobus was next in. His armour, painted mostly blue to denote his membership of the Chapter Librarium, lacked the grime and battle scars of the other Imperial Fists, his time on Opis being spent liaising with Commander Tchepikov and his intelligence staff.
‘I think we are going to need you here,’ said Lysander.
‘Death is everywhere,’ said Deiphobus. ‘It’s thick. I can feel it pushing me back. It doesn’t want me here.’
‘The perimeter looks firm,’ came Orfos’s voice from the entrance, where his Scouts remained to watch for threats from outside. Kirav and his fire-team stuck close to Lysander as he followed Ctesiphon into a sprawl of laboratories strewn with benches and equipment.
Tissue samples still lay on microscope slides. The contents of test tubes and flasks had dried up, leaving rings of sediment. This was just one lab – half a dozen more made up the upper floor.
‘Someone left here fast,’ said Lysander. ‘Their work undone. Was it of their own accord?’
‘It was not,’ replied Deiphobus. The Librarian picked up a skull, thoroughly cleaned and lacking its lower jaw, and turned it over in his hand. The cranium was scored across with marks, as if being used as a guide for some surgical procedure.
<
Lysander opened the door of a large booth in one lab, hooked up to a generator and surrounded by a ring of crystals mounted on a metal halo. Inside was a seat, moulded to accept a human form, with restraints on the ankles, wrists and neck. Several sizes of callipers hung on one wall, for measuring skull dimensions. On another wall were cabinets containing hundreds of glass slides in which were preserved slices of brain. A guard post still had a brace of autoguns racked under a desk.
‘Were they keeping intruders out, or the scientists in?’ said Sergeant Kirav.
Ctesiphon was holding position one floor down, where a single large room looked onto the abyss of the central shaft. The walls were lined with transparent cylinders. All but three were empty.